fuboTV CEO: ‘If anyone can afford to raise prices on consumers, it’s going to be fubo’
Consider this your warning, fuboTV subscribers. Today, CEO David Gandler appeared on CNBC and said, “If anyone can afford to raise prices on consumers, it’s going to be fubo.”
Gandler was playing defense after reporting strong Q3 subscriber numbers and getting smacked in the face by today’s wicked drop of 19% in the stock price (as of this writing). When the CNBC anchor pressed him on the price movement, Gandler touted the sports rights on the platform.
“We’re aggregating all of the most expensive sports content in the world,” Gandler said. “96% of our total subscriber base watch(es) sports. In the cable ecosystem, about 30% of customers watch sports. So when you raise prices due to sports acquisitions, what happens is the 70% that don’t watch sports typically don’t want to pay. So fubo has a high-quality premium subscriber base. We have pricing power.”
That certainly sounds like a service on the verge of price hike.
In March, Gandler shared something similar in an interview at the Deutsche Bank Conference TMT Conference, “I do believe we have more pricing power. And in my opinion, the pricing or the packaging is really relative to what’s being charged in the traditional space, right? If you have 70 million customers paying $120 or in some satellite services, where it can go $160, $170, clearly, there’s room for us to be able to price up. That’s not to say that we will, but we do have that optionality. And we’ve been the first to price up, I think, every year in the last 3 years…it really hasn’t had much of an impact.”
fuboTV has doubled down on its status as “the sports fan’s live TV streaming service” with some of its moves over the past few months. It recently added Sinclair’s ABC affiliates, giving sports fans in major markets like Washington D.C., Seattle, Columbus, St. Louis, and Portland the ability to watch NBA basketball and NCAA football games.
They also added Regional Sports Networks in Las Vegas and Seattle with AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain and ROOT Sports Northwest. However, it also added a regional sports fee to MSG, the New York-based RSN that is currently in a carriage dispute with Comcast, the region’s largest linear cable provider.
They also added NBA League Pass, the league’s out-of-market live game subscription service co-managed by the NBA and Turner Sports featuring nearly 1,000 out-of-market games per year.
But, they do lack TNT and TBS, which means they are without some nationally televised NHL, NBA, MLB games, as well as most of March Madness.
The company is going all-in on sports in more than one way. Gamblers in Iowa were the first to get their hands on the new fuboTV sportsbook app. And in yesterday’s earnings call, Gandler promoted a new AI company acquisition and how that may play out in real-time sports betting environments. “We’re very excited about the potential to further engage our subscribers and ultimately to become gateways to real-money wagering,“ Gandler said.
Fubo
Fubo is a live TV streaming service with about 90 top channels that start at $79.99 per month. This plan includes local channels, 25 of the top 35 cable channels, and regional sports networks (RSNs). In total, you should expect to pay about $91.99 per month, after adding in their RSN Fee. Fubo was previously known as “fuboTV.”